Blather, rinse, repeat

I guess the hardest thing about writing is learning to listen to others when it comes to getting critiqued. Or at least, hearing things that are something besides "omg you are the BEST and this is BRILLIANT," which is what 90% of your friends and family will say (and actually think), and those are usually the first cadre of people who read your work.

I know i always get defensive and my first response is to say all of this kind of stuff--i know best, it's my story, but you don't understand, etc. And, sometimes that's true--some readers aren't sophisticated enough to understand what you are doing with your work.

These people at the Big Famous Writing Critique place though, are not those readers, and if you have to take a couple days to get past the knee-jerk "but but but!" response, do so. Walk away and come back to it, or write something else in the interim.

I think, if you sit down and make a list of all the things they said to you, a few things will jump out as something that many people are stumbling over, things that get said more than once by several kinds of readers. And those are the things that, much as it hurts or that you may not want to, you will have to address if you want to actually sell the book and write for a larger or general readership.

It does NOT mean you have to dumb down your book or change the entire story, but clearly if several people have said "i love this and this and this but i don't know what you are talking about" (including now these authors/agents), you have a problem in the book, period. Maybe the solutions aren't the "common" or "obvious" solutions--genius is making the uncommon or the unexpected actually WORK--so maybe you don't open the book with a massive battle, but you have to find SOME way to keep readers engaged.

You rant often about Twilight, which i agree, those books eat all the shit in China with their bare hands. But, they are a success because they speak to their readers in a very basic, prepubertal, unintellectual level--the writing style and quality is immaterial, because everyone who loves them is reading them with the part of their mind that's their inner 13-year-old drawing hearts in the margins in pink inkpen. That's not your audience, or the book you're writing, so (and i hope this is not too blunt) rant away, but Twilight-syndrome ultimately got nothing to do with your own writing, unless you plan to begin writing for the swoony-teen (or swoony-teen-nostalgia) audience in a supernatural romance milieu.